Facebook finds balance with social games after Zynga breakup

Facebook has moved on now that it’s no longer married to a long-term relationship with Zynga and is now seeing a wider variety of successful social games, including a new number one “Crush.”

During the introduction to a day-long Facebook seminar at the Game Developer’s Conference at the Moscone Center, company officials said that as of last Friday, there were more people playing games on Facebook though its website and mobile apps than ever before.

They hardly even referred to Zynga, except for a brief mention of that “farm” game.

“We have a stable and growing platform on both desktop and mobile,” said Sean Ryan, Facebook’s director of games partnerships. “Users are generally happy with a greater diversity of games from a greater diversity of developers than they’re ever had. And we’re really happy.”

At the GDC, Facebook announced the launch of a new Game Center just for game developers and that the company was turning on a Timeline feature that will let Facebook members highlight their favorite video games in their profiles.

The Menlo Park company also released some new numbers, notably that there were 250 million Facebook members playing games each month. That’s one-fourth of Facebook’s 1 billion members.

Facebook also paid $2 billion in revenues to game developers in 2012. More than 100 game developers generated $1 million or more last year and the number of players who paid within games increased by 24 percent since March 2012.

By last month, 55 percent of the top 400 iOS games had a Facebook integration, and 20 percent of Facebook’s website users played games. And Facebook said it drove 263 million clicks to the Apple App Store and Google Play from its mobile News Feed last month.

That cross-platform integration was huge for games like King.com’s “Candy Crush Saga,” which according to the research company AppData has edged Zynga’s “FarmVille 2” to become the most popular Facebook game, with 45.6 million monthly average users.

“Candy Crush Saga,” which launched in November, is designed to synchronize across all platforms, so players can pick up where they left off whether they were playing on the website, on a smart phone or on a tablet.

And “Facebook is at the center of this user experience,” said King.com CEO and co-founder Riccardo Zacconi.

Back in 2010, Zynga’s original “FarmVille” was the center of social gaming on Facebook and the two company’s fortunes became intertwined. But that started unraveling as Facebook made changes to its News Feed after members began to complain about the increasing noise of game related posts, which had helped to make Zynga popular in the first place.

“If you weren’t a gamer, you had been wondering somewhat why people were asking you for cows, or that your crops were dying,” Ryan said. “Eventually, there was a backlash.”

So Facebook tinkered with its notification systems. “At that point, user satisfaction went up,” Ryan said. “Developer satisfaction, not so much. Developers went through this time where they were not sure how committed Facebook was to games.”

Now, Ryan said the company has reached a “great balance” that helps developers and Facebook members.

Meanwhile, Zynga took another step away from Facebook this week by eliminating the need to use a Facebook log-in to play a game, even on Zynga’s own website. That will let Zynga players create accounts just for games.

The move was made possible after Facebook and Zynga agreed to rewrite terms of a long term contract between the two companies.

Zynga

As the Facebook event went on, Zynga officials held their own discussion titled “Why Won’t FarmVille Go Away?”

Mike Perry, executive producer for FarmVille, said the game still ranked among the top 15 games last month even after more than three years because it has a loyal core of players who don’t necessarily identify themselves as gamers.

“It’s really because they treat ‘FarmVille’ as a hobby, not a game,” Perry said.

Typical “FarmVille” players are women in their 40s, 50s or 60s, and many have come up with elaborately decorated farms.

Since the game was launched, players have planted 2.8 billion virtual trees, including 125 million apple trees. They’ve also planted 16.9 billion white grape crops and had 280 million foals born.

Most importantly for Zynga’s bottom line, players have purchased more than $1 billion worth of virtual goods within the game.

Zynga has managed to keep the game going so long by continually listening to its players, adding new features and quests to keep them coming back.